Mommy Used to Be a Boy?
by Elianna22
Summary: Connor gaped at Zack, his eyes round and fever-bright. "Mommy used to be a boy?" he asked in a voice plaintive with alarm. Zack rolled his eyes. Didn't kids ask the darndest questions?


**A/N: Hello, dear readers :) In honour of Family Day, celebrated on Monday here in Ontario, here is a family-oriented one-shot. Special thanks to Tiger for contributing helpful ideas.**

**Disclaimer: Disney owns the Suite Life characters. I own everyone else.**

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**"Mommy Used to Be a Boy?"**

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_"Do I have to call you Dad?"_

_"That would be really cool, and I would definitely like that. When you're ready."_

[-]_  
_

Would Connor be ready today? Zack wondered as he had every morning since moving in with Bailey and Connor three weeks ago. He looked down at his son. Connor lay on the worn mahogany leather sofa in Bailey's living room, still in his Spider-Man pajamas, his shaggy blond head resting on a pillow in Zack's lap. The seven-year-old's face had a sickly flush and his eyes were closed. Each time he breathed out, Zack heard a wheezy rattle.

No, he decided, lowering the volume on CNN another notch, today probably wouldn't be the day.

Nonetheless, today was still a momentous occasion. Another of the many firsts that had taken place over the past three weeks—his first time playing Nurse Zack to this particular patient. The rest were recorded on his phone. Scrolling through the photos, he relived Connor's first game of Putt-Putt golf, his first visit to the Texas State Fair (Zack's first visit, too), his first quadruple scoop peanut butter chocolate chip vanilla cookie dough ice cream cone (but not the mess it made on the bathroom floor when Connor threw up later that evening), his first time dressing as a zombie for Hallowe'en.

Did these firsts make up for all the others he had missed? The ones Bailey had shared with him from the pages of her own photo album? Connor's first word ("Mama," aged ten-and-half months). His first steps (aged thirteen months). His first day of school (September 4, 2018). Scrolling through the photos again, Zack accepted that there was one truth he had to face: he was becoming one of those annoying people who bombarded family and friends with photos of their kid. Not that Cody, London, and his parents seemed to mind the photos he sent them everyday. In fact, they couldn't wait to meet Connor. And he didn't actually have any friends, or even acquaintances, here in Amarillo, Texas, where Bailey lived. So he had to make do with Bob, who still lived in Boston. Bob never complained about all the photos, either.

"Zack?" Connor's blue eyes had opened, the same shade as the bluest parts of Zack's eyes.

"What is it, buddy?" Zack asked him.

"I'm cold," Connor said, his teeth chattering. Five minutes ago he had been sweltering.

Zack picked up the blanket Connor had kicked off and tucked it around him. He touched Connor's sweaty little forehead. Still burning up. He had woken that morning with a fever of one hundred and three.

"Here, drink some more," he said, holding out a glass of watered-down apple juice. Bailey had left it on the coffee table before leaving for work. "It'll help the fever go down."

Connor took a few sips and began to cough. "My throat hurts."

Zack put the glass back on the table, next to the bottle of children's cough and cold syrup Bailey had rushed out to buy.

Connor erupted into a full-blown coughing fit that shook his entire body. "Owww," he moaned pitifully. His eyes watered like he was going to cry.

Zack rubbed his back until he stopped hacking.

The label on the bottle advised that children over the age of six could have one to two teaspoons every four to six hours. At 0730 Bailey had doled out exactly two teaspoons. It was now 1055 (almost time for _The View_).

"One more teaspoon can't hurt," he told Connor. He grabbed a clean spoon from the kitchen and Connor swallowed the cherry-flavoured liquid obediently.

"Mmmm, yummy," he said and curled up in a ball, laying his head on the pillow.

"You'll feel better soon," Zack said. He plumped the pillow, propped his feet on the coffee table, and reached for the remote.

"Zack?" Connor asked a few moments later.

"Yeah, buddy?"

Connor rolled onto his back and Zack immediately recognized his inquisitive expression: eyebrows drawn together and small lips pursed like he was sucking on a jawbreaker.

"How did you meet Mommy?" he asked.

Zack let out a slow breath, trying to remember how he had answered this question the last time. And the time before that. He didn't blame Connor for testing him, if that's what he was doing. _Smart kid_, he smiled to himself.

"Well," he began, "your mom and I met at sea school. We were both starting eleventh grade on a big ship that your Auntie London's dad owned. Remember I told you all about Auntie London? You're going to meet her and your Uncle Cody at Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks."

"But how did you meet her?" Connor persisted.

"On the first day of school."

"But how? Where?"

"Believe it or not, your mom was my roommate. She walked into my cabin wearing a baseball cap, baggy jeans, and a plaid hoodie and said in this gruff sexy ghetto accent, 'Yo, I'm Bailey Pickett. S'up?' It was one of those moments where your life changes, permanently, before you've even realized it. We had no idea how much we would turn each other's lives upside down. And now, all these years later, everything is right side up again."

Or that's what Zack would have said if Connor had been a few years older.

Instead he told a slightly altered version. "I met her when she walked into class. I noticed her right away."

"Was she pretty?"

Zack smiled. "Oh yeah, one look and I knew she was the prettiest dude I'd ever seen."

Connor gaped, his eyes round and fever-bright. "Mommy used to be a boy?" he asked in a voice plaintive with alarm.

_Ooops..._ "No, I mean she was dressed up as a boy,'' Zack amended hastily. "She was just, uh, wearing a costume. Because she wanted to fool everyone."

"Why did she want to do that?" Connor asked.

"She was just having fun. You know..." A blush forced its way up to Zack's face. "You know how your mom likes to have fun." He made a mental note to tell Bailey about this conversation to make sure their back-stories stayed in sync.

Connor seemed to digest this. His forehead wrinkled under the strands of hair sticking damply to it. "Did you ever think any other boy was pretty?" he asked.

Zack rolled his eyes. Didn't kids ask the darndest questions? "Uh, no," he said. "No, I never did." _And no more cough syrup for you, kiddo._ Under his breath he added, "Why don't you save that question for your Uncle Cody?"

Thankfully Connor yawned then and slipped into a drowsy silence.

Zack felt a small surge of relief. _Off the hook. For now._ He began to flip through channels. As he clicked to the Business News Network, an explosion of flashy graphics filled the screen and a voiceover boomed, sounding like a Monster Truck Jam announcer, "Welcome to the _M&A Report*_ with your host, Jack Ballsworth."

The screen switched to a studio that was trying too hard to be a living room The host sat in a cushy armchair, beaming beneath the antiseptic glare of spotlights.

"Joining me today is Cody Martin," he said, giving Zack a mild jolt of surprise, "Senior VP of Innovation at Tipton Martin Industries, and the man _Forbes_ magazine has named the New Face of Corporate America."

Zack raised the volume slightly.

The camera panned to Cody, who sat in an armchair across from Jack, looking more haggard than anyone who lived in a hotel with a five-star restaurant had a right to.

"Hey look, it's your Uncle Cody," Zack wanted to say, but chose not to. Connor's eyelids were drooping again. He needed his rest.

Jack, a toothy pipsqueak, the kind of guy Zack would have picked on as a kid, reached out to shake Cody's hand with both of his. "Thank you for being here, Cody. It's a pleasure to see you again."

"Likewise, Jack," said Cody to the camera. He had dark circles under his eyes. "Always great to be here."

The host got down to business. "2019 is shaping up to be a bumper year on the M&A battleground, and I don't think any analyst would disagree that the biggest victor is TMI. In a precedent-setting reverse hostile takeover of St. Mark Hotels & Resorts, TMI has created the largest hospitality conglomerate in the world. As of this morning, TMI trades on the New York Stock Exchange for $55.32 a share."

All Zack heard was "Blah blah blah, billions of dollars."

Cody offered a modest smile. "We believe that the combination of our two cultures will create multiple synergisms that will pay off in the future."

_Blah blah blah, more shoes for London._

"Now, when TMI set out to acquire St. Mark through a massive leveraged buyout," frothed the host, "were you expecting to trigger a wall of poison pills that would take eighteen months to dismantle? Including the scorched earth policy, which some might say ended up being a suicide pill?"

"Poison pills are part of the game," Cody said with a measured shrug. "But ultimately St. Mark's shareholders agreed that the acquisition was in the long-term best interests of the company."

"St. Mark's chairman wasn't exactly fighting off bids from white knights, was he? Although that didn't stop him from trying to find one. A bitter pill to swallow for a former corporate raider."

A fleck of saliva had landed on the lapel of Cody's signature navy blue suit. Cody's smile turned brittle as, very surreptitiously, he wiped his lapel with a pocket hanky. "As I said before, the St. Mark shareholders have no reason to complain." He shifted in his seat and Zack saw the gleam of pride in his eyes. "And while this type of transaction always exposes the low-hanging fruit, I'm especially pleased that we foresee no more than a twenty-five percent reduction in the St. Mark workforce."

"Spoken like a true humanitarian." Jack Ballsworth gripped his armrests, barely restraining, as far as Zack could tell, the urge to jump out of his chair, fling himself at Cody's feet, and hail him as the king of the world.

"This is boring," Connor said in a disgusted tone. "Put on cartoons."

_Saved by the kid_, Zack chuckled inwardly. "Sure thing, Tommy." He resumed clicking.

"Zack?"

"Yeah?"

"Who's Tommy?"

A cold prickle started at the back of Zack's neck, as if he had suddenly caught Connor's fever. "Tommy?" he said, neutralizing the unease in his voice. "Why do you ask?" Had he been talking in his sleep again? Bailey hadn't mentioned anything, although he hated asking her in the morning. He dreaded the possibility that he would scream in the middle of a nightmare and scare both Bailey and Connor.

"You just called me Tommy," Connor said. "Who's Tommy?"

Shit. Zack wanted to bite through his tongue. How was Connor supposed to learn to call him Dad if he stumbled like this? He glanced down to see his thumb touching his left wrist, tracing the blue letters reflexively, repetitively. Quickly he pulled his shirtsleeve over his wrist and stuffed his hand under the pillow.

"Tommy was..." He cleared his throat as memories raced through his mind. "Tommy is a really great guy and the best friend I ever had. A guy who'd give you the shirt off his back. Who knows all the funniest jokes and the scariest ghost stories and plays the craziest pranks. Anytime he saw a friend in need, he'd do whatever he could to help, but he was stubborn about asking for help himself. He's the bravest guy I ever knew, the kind of friend you never forget. And he loved cartoons."

"Where does he live?"

"He grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but... he's in Arlington now."

"So can I meet him?" Connor asked eagerly.

Taken aback, Zack said, "Yeah, I guess so." A lump had lodged in his throat. He swallowed hard, but it rose again like a cork bobbing to the surface. He coughed and brushed his hand through Connor's sandy-coloured hair, feeling it slip through his fingers. "Someday," he said. "Someday I'll take you to meet Tommy."

Connor smiled up at him, a sweet, fuzzy smile. "Cool."

On that day, whenever it happened to be, Zack hoped the eightball would still be there—the eightball he had planted in front of the white marble slab with the words that distinguished Tommy from the thousands and thousands of others:

_Thomas Juan Delgado  
SFC  
US Army  
May 19, 1989  
July 3, 2018_

When he finished planting the eightball, shiny as the toe of his motorcycle boot, he sat cross-legged on the grass, popped open a can of beer, and proceeded to tell Tommy everything he had promised to on that long-ago day at their home base in Germany—his twenty-fifth birthday—when Tommy's sunburned face had smirked triumphantly as a different eightball dropped into the far corner pocket after banking off two sides of the pool table, and then all the stuff a guy needed to tell his best bud after they had been apart for more than a year, and anything else that came to mind.

He talked until the can was empty, until his throat was hoarse and his shadow lengthened across the grass, jagged from the edges of marble, rows and rows of white stone stretching in every direction, filling all corners of his vision, broken up by flags and bunches of flowers still colourful in the dying light.

By the time he left, he could hardly see the words tattooed on his wrist. _Tommy 'Tin Man' Delgado / 1989–2018_.

The dates matched the pair on the tombstone. The dash represented Tommy's whole life, his accomplishments and victories, and every moment in between. Twenty-nine years. He hadn't wasted any of them. Not a single second of the days and hours allotted to him. Tommy hadn't been cannon fodder, had never been the easiest target to eliminate in an attack. That wasn't who he was, why he had died. Why he had chosen to train endlessly and live faraway from home and and fight a war in the shadows.

A snuffly sound stirred Zack from the thicket of memories and grief. He looked down.

Connor had dozed off, his arm folded around Zack's knee.

He sighed heavily and pressed his palm to his eyes. They stung like nettles. He took a few deep breaths, pulling himself together.

Connor snuffled again and began to snore softly. Zack felt himself smiling. Connor sounded like a little old man. He stroked Connor's forehead. Not quite as hot.

He dug his other hand out from under the pillow and laid his arm lightly across Connor's shoulders. With his free hand, he turned the TV volume down to the lowest level and kept on flipping channels. After a while he switched to closed captioning and let the scenes flicker past in a numbing, distancing parade of snapshots and faces, flashes of light and colour and white letters, interrupted by what must have been the occasional burst of laughter.

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**A/N: ****Fallen heroes should never be forgotten. More than 300,000 people are buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, including veterans from all the nation's wars. Extra thanks to Tiger, and Wyntirsno by extension, for letting me know about the poem "The Dash" by Linda Ellis, which is also cited in Chapter 1 of Tiger's new story **_**Angels**_**. Thank you for reading, you guys. Reviewers get virtual bratwurst and a cyber cheese plate. Xoxoxo – Ellie  
**

**For longtime readers, this one-shot takes place just before Chapter 2: "The Offer Still Stands" of **_**Never Be Another Tonight**_** when Connor still hasn't called Zack Dad yet and Cody is just about to quit his job at TMI. The idea for this scene also inspired me to write **_**Doing the Right Thing **_**from Zack's POV****, which took priority. **

***M&A – mergers and acquisitions**


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